Real Estate

Spanish Banks: A neighbourhood with history

Capt. George Vancouver arrived at this place that bears his name 220 years ago and it’s to his landing spot at Acadia Beach on Breakfast Bay that Terry Slack takes me.

We arrive at almost exactly the time that Vancouver did on an almost identical neap tide of only 3.32 metres. We look across the stripe of latte-coloured water from the Fraser River across the bay and try to imagine no freighters, no houses, no highrises, no bridge.

Slack is part sleuth, part historian and full-on storyteller. He grew up on the banks of the Fraser, fished since he was seven, salvaged logs (earning the nickname “River Pirate”) and is passionate about his neighbourhood, which includes the University Endowment Lands, Pacific Spirit Park and all the water that encircles Point Grey.

Using Capt. Vancouver’s logs and tide tables for 1792, Slack believes he has pinpointed the landing spot.

We walk along the beach searching for the three “weeps” that Vancouver mentioned in his logs – fresh water running down from the rivers and the streams. The captain needed fresh water to replenish his ships’ supply. He found it, staying ashore only about an hour. It is this city’s shame, Slack says, that there is no marker here. No information about Vancouver’s landing. No signs or brochures direct people to this spot near Howling Rock where the winter winds blow hard down from Howe Sound.

There are plaques commemorating the Spanish explorers closer to Spanish Bank beach, but nothing for the captain.

Vancouver’s landing spot was the destination we had set out for nearly two hours earlier when we met at the park board’s fish and chips stand on Spanish Bank.

It’s at that beach that Slack, his family and many other Vancouverites fished for smelts in the spring and early summer. “We had smelt shacks that we’d float along from the north arm of the Fraser in May and June and anchor here. We sold the smelts or traded them for food with the tugboat guys who’d stop,” he says, showing me one of the nets he used to use. “Everybody used to have one of these in their basement.”

The smelts all but disappeared about 20 years ago, their spawning grounds covered by the sand dredged from the bay to make the gravelly beach more attractive to swimmers and sunbathers.

But they used to spawn at the high-water mark. On those evenings in May, June and the end of July, families would set their nets and wait by bonfires blazing on the beach.

“I’ll probably not see that [the spawning] again in my lifetime, but maybe my grandchild will,” says 72-year-old Slack, pointing to where the sand is being eroded and the pea gravel uncovered by the relentless tides.

English Bay used to have three canneries: English Bay, Eagle Harbour and another near Lighthouse Park.

During the Second World War, all three canned the herring that also used to spawn on these beaches and donated it to Canadian troops overseas.

Salmon also used to be plentiful in the bay. In the mid-1960s, Slack’s family had its largest single-day’s catch of salmon in English Bay — 1,100 pounds from the early Stuart run.

We leave the beach, cross Marine Drive (originally called Queen’s Road) and go up the Admiralty Trail into Pacific Spirit regional park, which only exists because Slack and others lobbied for nearly 20 years to have it saved from development.

The steep-sided ravine is devoid of fir trees, which were first logged by the Spanish searching for masts and spars.

“We are walking on a trail that was probably walked on by [Spanish explorer Dionisio Alcala] Galiano in the 1700s and by Vancouver and by [Cayetano] Valdes,” says Slack.

Two millennia ago, there were longhouses here. First nations people gathered berries, fished and used the summer winds from the south to dry smelts, herring and salmon.

During the 1890s, John Stuart had a dairy farm here.

“He wanted to get his cans down to Queen’s Road and back. So, he invented a zipline. It was Vancouver’s first zipline ... A can zipline,” Slack says with a delighted laugh.

As we pass a giant cedar stump, he tells me that in the early 1900s, squatters lived in the woods and used portable mills to cut shakes and shingles for the roofs of the fast-developing city.

There are also Cascara trees. In the 1920s and 1930s, locals stripped the bark, put in it big sacks and sold it to pharmaceutical companies to make laxatives.

“It was an amazing industry until they figured out how to synthesize it. During the Dirty Thirties [the Great Depression], people were paid 10 to 15 cents a bag.”

Later, the forest supported people who collected and sold Spanish moss. More recently, Slack found and reported people who were illegally collecting ferns and salal leaves and selling them to florists.

Leaving the trail, we cross back across Marine Drive and head down to Acadia Beach along a wide slope that was once intended to be a ring road leading to a float plane dock and maybe even a ferry landing. It was another scheme Slack helped defeat.

We pass two huge boulders — the two sisters — one is marble like those at Lighthouse Park, the other deep grey.

The beach is littered with dozens of logs that have broken loose from a boom. It ignites Slack’s memories of being a salvager. Finally, after pausing at Vancouver’s landing place and taking a look further west toward the Second World War towers and Wreck Beach, we turn and head back to where we began.

At the park board concession, I choose fish and chips liberally sprinkled with malt vinegar, a throwback to my childhood, while Slack has a wild salmon burger – a reminder of last season’s abundant run.

We talk about how Vancouver seems intent on forgetting its past. Then, we part with the promise that next time we’ll walk along the Fraser.